Chinese EVs inch closer to the US as Canada slashes tariffs | Hacker News Reader

Chinese EVs inch closer to the US as Canada slashes tariffs

techcrunch.com

18 pointsspeckx15 comments

People lament that the US has basically surrendered the future of car manufacturing, but I think it was a forgone conclusion for a long time before anyone realized.

While I'm a citizen of the US, and would like Chinese people to have more freedom of political representation, I am glad that the world will benefit from Chinese EV's.

The world shouldn't buy US cars and certainly shouldn't take any pointers on politics.

This is for about 50k cars a year that are priced about 35k CAD or less. It's a small amount compared to Canada's 2mil car sales a year, but it is quite significant in the message it is delivering to the world about Canada being willing to diversify their economy in the wake of hostility from conventional partners. It'll be quite interesting how normal partners react.

Protecting their internal market and nurturing their native industries is how Chinese [1] products, including EVs, got to this point. Seeing this, what will Western countries do? Having forgotten how they attained their prosperity, will they open their markets and let competition decide the winner? A competition where one side's government will not allow their corporations to fail, so the 'competition' will be repeated until the correct outcome is attained.

[1] I don't mean to single out China, as no advanced economy reached its position via unrestricted free trade: James K. Galbraith has stated that "free trade has attained the status of a god" and that " ... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticis...

I don't see how the US could ever protect its domestic EV market enough to compete with China. Tesla was a leader for a while, and they've completely stagnated.

Now China has the scale and expertise to outcompete anyone. There will probably still be a market for more upscale cars like Rivian, but they will be drops in a bucket.

20 years ago you could have said the same about China - how could they ever hope to compete with US, EU, and Japanese cars that dominated the globe? Or how could the tiny island nation of Taiwan compete in semiconductors with giants like Intel and the continent-spanning USA?

That is true. We will have to see if Chinese car manufacturers can entrench themselves, get rich and lazy.

> I don't see how the US could ever protect its domestic EV market enough to compete with China

Trying to compete would've been a good start.

Not only did we not compete but deliberately sabotaged ourselves. There's a quote somewhere:

"You can count on the United States to do the right thing. After all other alternatives have been exhausted."

While Canada might have taken a step like this eventually, Trump being Trump made it far more likely due to his desire to alienate Canada.

Now it is likely that Chinese EVs will drive on US roads from Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto into the US and US citizens will see for themselves. I'm not a fan of cheap cheap labor in that it reflects poverty that shouldn't exist in the modern world, but the strategic insistence of Detroit to produce expensive, low-efficiency, low-capability SUVs will start to backfire.

Agreed on the labor aspect, though Chinese manufacturing is increasingly becoming very automated, sophisticated, and less reliant on exploitative labor.

> Now it is likely that Chinese EVs will drive on US roads from Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto into the US and US citizens will see for themselves.

It is not clear they will be allowed to cross the border in these cars.

These cars are street legal in the US. Ford's CEO used one as a daily driver. Unless the car stays permanently it wouldn't be counted as an import.

Aside from everything else, Ford's CEO is not going to be subjected to the same rules as you or I.

A reality of all gov regulators is a degree of flexibility with respect to people undertaking genuine R&D in an upfront and responsible way.

I wonder how different street legal in Canada is from in the US, given the connectedness of manufacturing and markets.

Maybe they will be banned for "national security".

EDIT: specific statements here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46651051]

Yes, I should have linked that story myself, it's one of the things that provoked the comment.

There are differences for street legality mainly around importing older cars which meant at one point the JDM scene in Canada had access to a lot more cars than the US did.

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